When GNOME did its version 3 and Ubuntu came up with Unity, the popularity of Linux Mint sky-rocketed, because they stuck with GNOME 2.32. The Mint team has been working on their next version for a while now, and today, they first unveiled what they're working on. There's good news - the team is working on making GNOME 3 likeable. Their question for this release: "How do we make people like Gnome 3? And what do we provide as an alternative to those who still do not want to change?"

they hate for a reason. If your computer was good and awesome, an update messed that up.. In windows lands they would even sue microsoft for ruining their "experience" (which has happened all over the world several times) Destroying lets say kde3 interface with the complete bullcrap that is plasma is just a piss in the face of the users, The apps are still good and QT is still awsome. A fork might not win out in the long run, but in this particular case i think it will. DeskMATE WILL be the gnome desktop in a year and gnome3 will be dead. The difference from Trinity vs KDE4 is alot alike but still not. Trinity does not benefit from qt4 and that is it's downfall. There is no such limitations in G* land and gnome3 will be dead in a year or two unless they adapt what the people want.

Some people seems to forget how broken and buggy kicker was... Probably because they are members of the "It was better before" sects. Since KDE 4.2 (or even 4.1, but 4.2 is first really stable release), you can make your plasma desktop looks exactly like your KDE 3 one (even the icon mess on the desktop), and it is what I have been doing (but without the icon mess). And that is the real reason why trinity will not get any traction, except among members of the "It was better before" sect. And for those with hardware problem, yes it is true that KDE4 (and Gnome3) have issues with the (poor) quality of graphics driver, but at least with KDE4 once the animation are disabled, it works perfectly fine (and on a side note, there is no effect with KDE3 so it was not better before).

However, Gnome 3 is in a different situation, the whole shell is so rigid that you cannot customize it to make it work like you want it to work. It forces you to work the way the Gnome UI team wants you to work. Meaning that users who do not fit in that vision are left to look for alternative, or create for of Gnome 3 that will fit their need.